Archive for April 2017

Ancient stone carvings confirm that a comet struck the Earth around 11,000BC, a devastating event which wiped out woolly mammoths and sparked the rise of civilisations.

Experts at the University of Edinburgh analysed mysterious symbols carved onto stone pillars at Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, to find out if they could be linked to constellations.

The markings suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth at the exact same time that a mini-ice age struck, changing the entire course of human history.

Scientists have speculated for decades that a comet could be behind the sudden fall in temperature during a period known as the Younger Dryas. But recently the theory appeared to have been debunked by new dating of meteor craters in North America where the comet is thought to have struck.

However, when engineers studied animal carvings made on a pillar – known as the vulture stone – at Gobekli Tepe they discovered that the creatures were actually astronomical symbols which represented constellations and the comet.

The idea had been originally put forward by author Graham Hancock in his book Magicians of the Gods.

The artifacts they found on Hedges’ server provide an interesting look at the group’s early operations, showing how they improved their code and methods over time, if indeed they are the group now known as Turla.

“It’s almost like archaeology; you can see the evolution of tradecraft,” Rid told Motherboard. “There was a lot of handiwork involved. They didn’t really use automated command-and-control at the time; they actually had to log in and move data around [manually].”

The Moonlight Maze group stripped away components that didn’t work and combined tools that did to make them more potent. And unlike modern hacking operations that use a lot of automated scripts, the Moonlight Maze operators did everything in real time. They would log-in to Hedges’ server in the morning and manually set up tasks to tell their malware what to do, which got populated out to all the infected machines on DoD and government networks that they controlled.

“This is hacking in the 90s, so it looks very different from what we’re used to in modern operations,” Guerrero-Saade said.

On April 5-14 2017, the team behind the Event Horizon Telescope hopes to test the fundamental theories of black-hole physics by attempting to take the first ever image of a black hole’s event horizon (the point at which theory predicts nothing can escape). By connecting a global array of radio telescopes together to form the equivalent of a giant Earth-sized telescope – using a technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry and Earth-aperture synthesis – scientists will peer into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy where a black hole that is 4m times more massive than our sun – Sagittarius A* – lurks.